Tudor Girba Call 5/20/19

• all little prototypes in separate places. very different effort than system
• at what date would a working system be acceptable?
  • me: 10 or 20 years
  • him: 10 isn’t so far. 20 is
• they use moldablity (instead of malleablility) because it’s more google-able
  • they aren’t defining what it is to allow all sorts, like blocks
  • they want to allow others to build prototypes on their platform so they aren’t prototypes
  • PX is focus on programmer. they are DX (develop-ment experience)
• there should be no place between the end-user and programmer
  • spreadsheets have a hard black box boundary
• they start with low level developer world and add user stuff, because developer has to deal with all details
  • “programming sprinkled on top”
• always you need a thesis at any given time so you know where you are
  • why is it a “thesis defense”? people will try to attack and invalidate what you are saying. your work can defend a single statement with a verb inside.
  • thesis defines a territory and it has to be important enough for someone to attack it. the paper is just the army/evidence to fight for the statement. if the statement is too wide, stretch army too thin
  • needs to be clear, maybe contrarian
  • how do I give enough evidence to show the vision is attainable? the sharper the thesis, the better I will understand what is missing and how to test it
• example of his thesis: systems are specific so the development must be (there is no other way) customized.
• he has a method: demo driven design
  • http://demodriven.com/
  • he discovered working with researchers
  • humane interface chapter: locus of attention
    • we cannot do multiple things at same time, so subconscious does things
    • but hard to bring back to consciousness, hard to reason about
  • issue with research: you’re doing/reading same as everyone else so little chance of producing something new
  • make all assumptions you are reading explicit is a great trick to get feedback
  • demo the thesis once per week for years: find a story and show it as concretely as possible to deal with details
  • when you can’t tell story and demo at same time, something is wrong because the system is telling a different story than you are
• ask people for their thesis at next conference I go to
  • he will be at CurryOn
  • ask people if they enjoyed the last 6 months, partially because papers leading up to it don’t really gel/mesh together
• thesis is similar to writing test first
  • you can always change test
  • at any given moment you have assertion that can be true or false
  • most people write assertion at very end
• ideas for thesis
  • modularity / composability
  • something with fp
  • color picker changer
    • what about changing parts inside the color picker?
    • Tudor: GT is the platform in the world for this now
      • single render tree
      • editor/environment is a language (can be programmed)
      • they have a reactive engine (graph dependencies, infinite loop issues)
• GT
  • all remote
  • no meetings ever
  • people work as much they want and on anything
  • they don’t even have a backlog
  • how do they synchronize?
    • any synchronization system is a bottleneck
    • rely on eventual consistency
  • their issues on github tell a story
    • this is how the bug looked before, here’s the thing I built to test the bug, and people can relate to that in minutes
    • the story of what they are doing is an engineering product
    • different than MVP
    • not to validate/invalidate but find what is missing